Donovan And Holm

"for we're riding out to Terran sky!

"Terran sky! Terran sky!"

-Poul Anderson, "Sargasso of Lost Starships" IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 367-436 AT p. 436.

A song sung by Basil Donovan who had resisted the Terran Empire but has now been incorporated into it. These words could mean either riding out to fight Terrans or riding out to claim sky for Terra:

"The thought came all at once that it could be a song of comradeship, too." (ibid.)

"'You can't leave now,' Daniel Holm told his son. 'Any day we could be at war. We may already be.'"

-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Rise Of The Terran Empire, pp. 437-662 AT I, p. 437.

Points to note:

by "we," Holm means Avalon;

by "at war," he means "at war against the Terran Empire";

that is the same Terran Empire that had annexed Donovan's home planet, Ansa, a century previously;

Donovan sings on p. 436 and Holm speaks on p. 437, unusually without any interval of a blank page or an internal title page;

"Sargasso of Lost Starships" was first published in January, 1952, whereas The People Of The Wind was first published in February-April, 1973;

thus, we can expect to find major differences in the writing despite the retroactively decreed proximity of these two works as instalments of a single future history series.